PROVIDENCE – The two-year-old e-publishing service provider Tizra Inc. has been on a roll in recent weeks, winning new funding support from the state and signing agreements with top names in the world of academic publishing.

“The announcements of the past week mark a fundamentally new phase for Tizra,” Tizra President and COO Abe Dane told Providence Business News.

The Slater Technology Fund, a quasi-public venture capital fund, recently committed new funding to Tizra, bringing Slater’s total investment in the company to $650,000.

“Tizra has spotted an important opportunity for publishers, and enabled it with a graceful, deceptively simple, technology solution,” Thorne Sparkman, managing director of Slater, said while announcing the new support.

Dane thanked Slater for its continued support. “Slater’s decision to reinvest underlines their confidence not only that our business and technology can scale quickly, but that Tizra's ability to turn books into new electronic products will unlock a huge amount of new value for readers and publishers,” he said.

Separately, the company also released news of two new business ventures in the higher-ed sector.

The Association of American University Presses, which includes more than 130 nonprofit academic publishers, announced an agreement with Tizra to provide its members with discounted rates for the Tizra Publisher platform, a Web-based application for distributing and selling electronic books and other content.

Brenna McLaughlin, the association’s electronic and strategic initiatives director, said Tizra’s software is affordable for small presses, but scalable for larger ones, as well.

“AAUP presses are exactly the kinds of organizations we designed Tizra Publisher to help,” Tizra CEO David Durand said in a news release. “They have great content and great marketing ideas but often lack the technical resources we provide to build a successful ebook program.”

The association is arranging “Webinars” with Tizra for other interested members starting this month.

The MIT Press, one of the largest American university presses, also announced it has launched a new Web site called CISnet that uses Tizra’s software to let subscribers search and view full text from more than 150 of the publisher’s books.

Gita Manaktala, MIT Press’s marketing director, said Tizra’s software allowed the publisher to offer “complete control over our brand and without the risk and expense of developing our own software.”

Tizra has also inked deals over the past year with Duke University Press, the New York Botanical Garden Press and The Federation Press.

“After showing that our technology can meet the needs of a few demanding, high-profile publishers like MIT Press, we’re now showing that it can be rolled out quickly and efficiently to large numbers of them at once through distribution agreements like the one with AAUP,” Dane said.

Tizra Inc. is a software-development startup whose investors include the quasi-public Slater Technology Fund. Its first product is AgilePublisher, an online publishing and delivery service that makes it easier to sell and distribute data from PDFs. Additional information is available at www.tizra.com.

The Slater Technology Fund, established in 1997 by then-Gov. Lincoln Almond and the R.I. General Assembly, provides seed capital to technology-based businesses in Rhode Island. Additional information is available at www.SlaterFund.com.

Correction: Oct. 8, 2008

This article has been revised to correct the name of The Association of American University Presses.